EmuDroid 4: Completed!

March 8, 2014 by 13 Comments

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[Tony Huang] is checking in with his EmuDroid 4 gaming controller. After tons of redesigns — it is now finished!

We first started following this project back in November, when it was in an early prototype stage. What he has done is crammed a 4″ Android tablet, the guts of a USB SNES controller, a USB OTG adapter and inductive charging unit into a custom designed 3D printed housing.

What we really like about this project is the level of documentation [Tony] has gone into during his many… many… many iterations of the 3D printed housing. For those of you who aren’t engineers or designers, it’s a great insight into what goes into prototyping a product before release. Now just imagine what it was like when we didn’t have 3D printers! Continue reading “EmuDroid 4: Completed!” →

Real Or Fake? The Amazing Ping-Pong Robot

March 8, 2014 by 60 Comments

Would you like to play a robot in ping pong (translated)? We sure would. Inspired by an upcoming face-off between man and machine, [Jakob] wrote in to tell us about [Ulf Hoffmann’s] ping-pong playing robot. If you ever wanted to play ping-pong when no one else was around or are just sick and tired of playing against the same opponents this project is for you. Boy is this thing amazing; you simply must see the robot in action in the video after the break.

While the robot’s build is not documented all in one post, [Ulf Hoffmann’s] blog has many videos and mini posts about how he went about building the paddle wielding wonder. The build runs the range from first ideas, to hand-drawn sketches, to the technical drawings seen above. From these the parts of the arm were built, but the mechanical assembly is only one portion of the project. It also required software to track the ball and calculate how to properly return it. Be sure to browse through his past posts, there is a wealth of information there.

Also be sure to check in on March 11th to see who wins the epic face-off between man and machine. See the trailer (the second embedded video) after the break.

UPDATE: Many commentators are calling this one a fake. It’s so sad to think that, because this is a really cool project. But we’ve changed the title and are asking you to weigh in on whether you think it is real or fake. We’ve also contacted [Ulf] and asked if it is real hardware, or a CGI enhanced video. We’ll let you know if/when we hear back from him.

Continue reading “Real Or Fake? The Amazing Ping-Pong Robot” →

Mathematical! 3D Printed BMO Has A Full Range Of Emotions

March 8, 2014 by 2 Comments

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Big fan of Adventure Time? Then you’re going to love this adorable 3D printed BMO robot!

Adventure-what? Adventure Time is a “kids” TV show about Finn (the human) and Jake (the dog), and their personal computer, BMO, a quirky little robot Game Boy. It’s one of the shows that adults can enjoy as well — sometimes wondering how it even is a kids show compared to other stuff on TV!

Anyway, [Noé] and [Pedro] are big fans of the show and they have decided to try making their own 3D printed BMO. It makes use of an 8×8 LED matrix to display BMO’s full range of emotions, which is controlled by a Gemma — a tiny 1″ diameter Attiny85 platform board programmable with the Arduino IDE over USB. They’ve even found a super handy animation tool for the LED matrix, which allows you to very easily add your own expressions and animations — simply copy the output code, replace anim.h, and you’re in business!

Stick around to see how it’s done!

Continue reading “Mathematical! 3D Printed BMO Has A Full Range Of Emotions” →

Solving Endstop Woes With A Simple Analog Filter

March 7, 2014 by 19 Comments

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You know what’s cool? Using your engineering knowledge to solve problems that you have while building something. This is exactly what [Reinis] did when his 3D printer’s endstop wasn’t working.

Many of us automatically go to a microcontroller when we run into a problem with a sensor, but often a simple analog filter will do the trick. The endstop in [Reinis’s] RepRap style 3D printer was giving off an unusual amount of noise when closed. When he hooked the endstop up to his oscilloscope, he was shocked to see how much noise there really was. In comes the low-pass filter. Unhappy with the response time of his low-pass filter, [Reinis] solved the problem using a pullup resistor. Two resistors and a capacitor was all that he needed to fix the problem. A great solution!

How have you used analog filters in your projects? Send us a tip and let us know!

Web Controlled Servo From A BeagleBone Black

March 7, 2014 by 13 Comments

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[Babak] created an in-depth tutorial on how he got his BeagleBone Black to control a servo from a web browser.

[Babak] configured a pin on his BeagleBone Black (BBB) as a PWM line and connected it to the control line on a micro hobby servo. The BBB is running a Node.js web server that displays a simple web page to control the servo. The browser sends a WebSocket request to a small WebSocket node server also running on the BBB that then writes the appropriate PWM value to the pin connected to the servo.

The code for node WebSocket server and web server can be found on his GitHub page. There is also a small node library to control PWM lines on the BBB. Though the end result is simple, controlling the servo can be done from any browser that can make a network connection to the BeagleBone Black. Check out the video after the jump for a description and demonstration.

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An Affordable Full Body Studio Grade 3D Scanner

March 7, 2014 by 32 Comments

Looking for a professional 3D scanning setup for all your animation or simulation needs? With this impressive 3D scanning setup from the folks over at [Artanim], you’ll be doing Matrix limbos in no time!  They’ve taken 64 Canon Powershot A1400 cameras to create eight portable “scanning poles” set up in a circle to take 3D images of, well, pretty much anything you can fit in between them! 

Not wanting to charge 64 sets of batteries every time they used the scanner or to pay for 64 official power adapters, they came up with a crafty solution: wooden batteries. Well, actually, wooden power adapters to be specific. This allows them to wire up all the cameras directly to a DC power supply, instead of 64 wall warts.

To capture the images they used the Canon Hack Development Kit, which allowed them to control the cameras with custom scripts. 3D processing is done in a program called Agisoft Photoscan, which only requires a few tweaks to get a good model. Check out [Artanim’s] website for some excellent examples of 3D scanned people.

Continue reading “An Affordable Full Body Studio Grade 3D Scanner” →

Using An NRF24L01 For Air Bootloading

March 7, 2014 by 16 Comments

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[Necromant] wrote a library to flash his microcontroller over an RF link using an NRF24L01 wireless communication module. The NRF24L01 is a cheap RF module that can be easily integrated into many microcontroller projects. Though there are Arduino libraries for driving the NRF24L01, [Necromat] decided to make a port of one with no Arduino dependencies.

The resulting bootloader fits into 4K of RAM flash with packet loss and recovery along with user-configurable hardware or software SPI. Programming speeds are not the highest, but [NecromatNecromant] believes this to be a property of the VUSB rather than the transfer rate from the NRF24L01 or the target microcontroller.

To program the target AVR chip, [NecromatNecromant] used another NRF24L01 module connected to his uISP dongle over USB.  Using a custom tool to interface with the uISP, the target board can be programmed in a similar fashion as avrdude. Check out the code for the ISP dongle and the AVR bootloader on his GitHub page.